Tag Archives: Darlington

No matter how many engineering hours you’ve logged over the years, it’s always a good idea to keep in mind that properly focusing on specs and code can make or break a project. In 2013, Aubrey Kagan—an experienced engineer and long-time Circuit Cellar author—explained this quite well in CC25:

There was a set of BCD thumbwheel switches that I was reading into a micro. In order to reduce the number of input lines required, each 4 bits of a digit was multiplexed with the other digits and selection was made by a transistor enabling the common line of each switch in turn. This was standard industry practice. The problem was that in order to economize, I had used the spare transistors in a Darlington driver IC. Everything worked fine in the lab, but on very hot days the unit would fail in the field with very strange results.

Long story short, the saturation voltage on the Darlington transistor would increase with temperature to above the digital input threshold and the micro would read undefined switch settings and then jump to non-existing code. I learned three things: read and understand all the specifications on a datasheet, things get a lot hotter in a cabinet in the sun than the lab, and you should make sure your code can handle conditions that are not supposed to occur.—Aubrey Kagan, CC25 (2o13)